Every business should have an online presence, and a website should provide information about the business quickly, easily, and in a style that aligns with the brand image. However it’s designed, a website provides perceived credibility and quality of your business. If your website has poor graphic design (whether it’s the layout, typography, or colors), users may turn away immediately or may think you’re a business who doesn’t know what they’re doing and not trust your products or services. Here is some great information on why your website is important to prospective clients, how to ensure you have good graphic design, and how this will positively affect your SEO.
Poor Design
It takes less than two-tenths of a second for an online visitor to form a first opinion of your brand once they've perused your company's website, according to researchers at the Missouri University of Science and Technology. Many older websites have poorly positioned content, lurid colors and awkward graphics, and will likely send users running in the opposite direction. With good website design, content should be placed correctly and design should be well-thought-out. The website should look aesthetically pleasing and also easy to navigate. Pay attention to colors, graphics, and fonts. A poor UX kills SEO.
Mobile friendly
If images and graphics don’t translate well to smaller tablet and mobile screens, your search engine results page position will suffer. Content should load quickly and adjust to the correct screen size. Some statistics on mobile: 25% of users in the US exclusively use a mobile device to access the internet. 74% of people are likely to return to a website if it is optimized for mobile and 53% of mobile visits are abandoned if a page takes more than three seconds to load.
Choose the right fonts
Fonts matter on digital platforms. So much so, that people have developed web fonts that work specifically for websites, allowing designers to use custom fonts that aren’t available on computers while still ensuring their design (and overall branding) remains consistent no matter who’s viewing it, or where. Using the wrong font could result in the webpage being unreadable or looking unprofessional, sending users quickly away.
Challenge for Attendees:
Take a few hours and use your website as if you were a new client, on desktop, tablet, and mobile. Take notes of the experience and what you love, what could be better, and compare the experience between every device. Run analytics reports on your site to see what is doing well, understand how your users interact with your page, and find out how your design is affecting the UX and impacting your SEO.
Sources:
http://gdusa.com/blog/why-bad-graphic-design-will-kill-your-websites-seo
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/223150
https://www.upwork.com/hiring/design/what-are-web-fonts-and-why-are-they-important/
https://designadvisor.net/blog/ux-statistics/
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